Employee Engagement

Why organisations work with Zavier Coyne He is the rare generational expert who belongs to the generation in question. Most authorities on Gen Z are older researchers studying it from the outside; Zavier started his first business at 15 and works the subject as a digital native, so he can translate in both directions between senior leaders and the employees they struggle to read. His Generational Intelligence framework gives leaders something to fix instead of someone to blame. He treats young-employee friction as a structural mismatch in how digitally native people handle feedback and authority, not as an attitude or entitlement problem. The work is tied to numbers leaders already own. Gen Z Coach engages on retention and engagement with clients from tech start-ups to FTSE 100 and NYSE-listed companies, so sessions are built around measurable outcomes, not sentiment. One engagement can reach both sides of the divide. He speaks to senior leadership on leading digitally native talent and to early-career employees on working across generations without lowering standards, addressing the friction from both directions at once. Biography highlights Co-Founder of Gen Z Coach, a multigenerational performance consultancy whose clients range from tech start-ups and universities to FTSE 100 and NYSE-listed companies Originator of the Generational Intelligence (GQ) framework, a behavioural skillset for leading and working across digitally native generations TEDx speaker and guest contributor to the University of Bath School of Management Skills Series Accredited Coach at the highest level of the Association for Coaching and a Master Intuitive Psychology Coach Fellow of beVisioneers: The Mercedes-Benz Fellowship, taking part in the fellowship’s youth-entrepreneurship session at Davos during the 2026 World Economic Forum Featured guest on generational-leadership podcasts including TomorrowToday Global’s Elephants in the Boardroom, and founder of a self-development podcast that topped the Apple charts Biography Gen Z is the first generation shaped entirely by digital systems from birth, and it is now entering workplaces built for an earlier era. The result is friction that most leaders misread. Falling retention and flat engagement get blamed on attitude, when the real gap is in how digitally native employees handle feedback and authority. Zavier Coyne built his work around closing that gap. Through Gen Z Coach, the consultancy he co-founded, he reframes the issue as a structural mismatch rather than a values problem. He gives it a name: Generational Intelligence, a behavioural skillset that both leaders and young employees can be trained in. His clients run from tech start-ups and universities to FTSE 100 and NYSE-listed companies, and the work is measured on retention and engagement. What separates him from most voices on the subject is position. The established authorities on Gen Z tend to be older researchers describing it from the outside. Zavier is a digital native who started his first business at 15 and works the subject from inside the generation. That lets him translate in both directions, which is why senior leaders use him as a bridge to employees they find hard to read. The credentials are concrete. Zavier is a TEDx speaker and an Association for Coaching accredited coach at the highest level. As a fellow of beVisioneers: The Mercedes-Benz Fellowship, he joined the programme’s youth-entrepreneurship session at Davos during the 2026 World Economic Forum. Key speaking topics Generational intelligence in the workplace The digitally native workforce Gen Z retention and engagement Multigenerational team dynamics The future of work Early-career talent development Ideal for CHROs and Heads of Talent facing falling retention or engagement among early-career employees HR and L&D leaders, including Heads of Learning & Development, designing programmes for a five-generation workforce Senior leaders and people managers who run digitally native teams and want to reduce generational friction Organisations whose growth depends on recruiting and keeping Gen Z talent, from tech start-ups to large listed firms Audience outcomes A shared language for naming generational friction, so teams stop putting it down to attitude or entitlement Specific changes managers can make to feedback and expectations with digitally native employees A clearer read on what actually makes Gen Z different at work, separated from what is simply misunderstood For younger employees, practical ways to work across age groups without lowering their own standards

Why organisations work with Nilofer Merchant Her Onlyness framework offers a structural diagnosis for why innovation stalls inside organisations: not a confidence problem or a diversity problem, but a systemic filtering-out of unconventional ideas that the existing norms were built to do. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) names 24 specific norms – including performance reviews, servant leadership, and “move fast and break things” – that actively undermine the conditions for great work, and provides a measurable, team-applicable alternative for each one. She holds a position few speakers occupy: genuine technology executive experience (Apple, Autodesk, Symantec; 100+ products; $18B in revenues) combined with management research that Thinkers50 cited as among the five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years. She reframes the productivity and innovation conversation away from individual behaviour change – where most leadership speakers operate – and onto the systems and norms that leaders themselves control, which is a more actionable entry point for a board or senior team. Ranked by Thinkers50 as the “#1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice,” her work carries both intellectual authority and practical application at the senior level. Biography highlights Author of four books on organisational performance and work design: The New How (O’Reilly, 2010), 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra (Harvard Business Review, 2012), The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017), and Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) Thinkers50 “Future Thinker” Award, 2013; ranked #22 globally in 2017 ranking; Thinkers50 Top 50, 2021; The Power of Onlyness shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award TED mainstage speaker; “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks Harvard Business Review contributor; media coverage includes Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and CNN Former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and GoLive; personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue across 25 years in technology Teaches business strategy and collaborative management at Stanford University and Santa Clara University; MBA, Santa Clara University Founder, The Intangible Labs; top 10 HR thinker, HR Magazine Biography Nilofer Merchant starts from an observation that most organisations resist: the management tools that delivered performance in the twentieth century are actively limiting performance now. From her position as founder of The Intangible Labs and author of four books on work design, she has spent twenty-five years building an evidence base for that claim, and an alternative. Her Onlyness framework, developed in The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017) and cited by Thinkers50 as one of five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years, holds that modern value creation flows not from hierarchy or title, but from the distinct perspective that only each individual can bring. When organisations filter out that perspective through deference, conformity, and outdated norms, they lose the one input that capital and process cannot replicate. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) takes that argument into the operational detail boards and leadership teams can actually act on. It names 24 specific norms – from performance reviews to servant leadership to “move fast and break things” – that suppress contribution, trust, and innovation, and pairs each with a measurable alternative. The argument is structural: the problem is not the willingness of people to perform, but the systems they are asked to perform inside. Merchant’s authority on this is grounded in operating experience. A former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and Symantec, she personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue. She has contributed to Harvard Business Review, been ranked #22 among the world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers50, and teaches business strategy at Stanford University and Santa Clara University. Her TED talk “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks. Key speaking topics Organisational norms and performance systems The Onlyness framework and value creation Intangible value in modern organisations Collaborative strategy and execution Innovation and idea suppression in hierarchical structures Future of work and work design Culture change as systems change Ideal for CHROs and People leaders designing or overhauling performance and culture systems CEOs and senior leadership teams asking why execution consistently falls short of strategy Chief Innovation Officers and transformation leads examining why new ideas fail to scale internally Boards and executive committees evaluating whether their management models are still fit for purpose Audience outcomes A named diagnostic framework (Onlyness) for identifying where organisational value is being systematically suppressed – and why Specific understanding of which widely adopted management practices are actively limiting innovation and contribution in their own organisations A practical model for replacing competition-based and hierarchy-based norms with trust and collaboration-based alternatives, drawn from Our Best Work‘s 24-indicator framework Language for the gap between what organisations currently measure and what actually creates value – useful for board-level and senior team conversations Concrete team-level practices applicable immediately post-session, drawn from the chapter-by-chapter practice model in Our Best Work

Why organisations work with Anna Hemmings A first-hand performance record with operating substance behind it. Six world titles, two Olympic Games, and twelve years running her own consultancy with named global clients. A direct, evidence-based take on resilience as a trainable capability. Her recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and return to win three further world titles is the case study, not the headline. Accredited delivery on team performance through the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model, used in workshop and team-development formats, not just keynote. Material that translates to senior leadership audiences. Beyond the Barriers has worked with leadership teams at IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Roche, Deloitte, British Airways, and NatWest. Biography highlights Six-time Marathon Kayak World Champion, K-1 and K-2 disciplines, 1999 to 2007. Two-time Olympian for Great Britain: Sydney 2000 (K-1 500m), Beijing 2008 (K-2 500m). MBE, 2010 New Year Honours, for services to sport. Sunday Times Sports Woman of the Year, Champions Award (2005). Founder and Managing Director, Beyond the Barriers, a high-performance training consultancy. Accredited trainer in the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model. Biography Britain’s most successful female marathon kayaker spent more than a decade winning at the top of an endurance sport, and then spent the following decade translating what she learned into work with senior leadership teams. The athletic record is six world titles between 1999 and 2007 and two Olympic Games. The second decade is the operating substance behind her speaking work. The pivot point in her story is medical. At the peak of her career Anna Hemmings was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and told racing was unlikely to return. She came back to win three further world titles and qualify for Beijing 2008. That recovery is the working material she uses with leaders, not as inspiration but as a worked example of resilience as a set of repeatable practices. Through her consultancy, Beyond the Barriers, she works with senior leaders and teams at organisations including IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Roche, Deloitte, British Airways and NatWest. She is an accredited High Performance and Leadership Coach and an accredited trainer in the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model. Her sessions move beyond keynote into masterclass and longer-form team development. What separates her from the standard athlete-speaker is the consultancy work. She is not narrating a sporting career to an audience of executives, she is bringing twelve years of applied practice with leadership teams to bear on a specific organisational question: how senior people hold their performance and judgement when the load does not let up. Key speaking topics Resilience as a leadership capability Performance under sustained pressure High-performing team development Mindset and recovery in high-stakes environments Confidence and composure in senior roles Sustained excellence and the disciplines behind it Ideal for C-suite and executive leadership teams managing prolonged operational pressure Senior leaders moving into bigger remits where composure becomes a visible variable Sales and commercial leadership audiences operating in high-stakes deal cycles HR and L&D programmes building resilience and team performance into leadership development Audience outcomes A working definition of resilience that goes beyond willpower, with practices that can be used immediately A clearer view of how senior leaders maintain judgement and composure under sustained load Specific behaviours for building trust and accountability inside leadership teams A first-hand account of recovery and return to elite performance, used as worked content rather than story Language for talking about performance under pressure with their own teams

Why organisations work with Neelu Kaur She treats workplace silence as a structural problem. Most speakers in this space coach individuals to be more confident; her intervention sits in meeting design and the conversational rules that decide who gets to challenge a senior idea. The Self-Trust Recession is her named diagnosis of the moment: capable leaders, surrounded by AI and competing opinion, are second-guessing themselves and outsourcing decision authority. Her Self-Trust Reset framework is the way back. Her cross-cultural lens, the collective “we” she was raised in meeting the individualistic “I” of American corporate life, makes her credible to global and AAPI audiences who have lived that gap themselves. Her tools combine cognitive and body-based techniques. The pairing of organisational psychology training (Columbia, NYU Stern) and sixteen years of yoga and Ayurveda teaching produces practical methods her audiences can apply in the next meeting they walk into. Be Your Own Cheerleader, published by Post Hill Press in January 2023, gives her work a published thesis a senior buyer can read before commissioning. Biography highlights Author of Be Your Own Cheerleader (Post Hill Press, 2023), a guide to self-advocacy that addresses the cultural gap between collective and individualistic workplace norms. MA in Social and Organizational Psychology, Columbia University, and BS from NYU Stern School of Business. Certified NLP Master Practitioner and Coach, NLP Center of New York. Client list includes Google, Bloomberg, Sony Music, RBC, Ernst & Young, and Jefferies. Featured on Morning Brew’s Good Work and TV Asia / SEEMA Network’s Sundays with Seema. Chief Guide at Chief (NYC), with over sixteen years as a yoga teacher and Ayurveda practitioner. Biography Most organisations have more talent than they have contribution. Capable people stay quiet at exactly the moments their judgement is most needed, and what looks like alignment is often silence. This is the tension Neelu Kaur takes on. Trained as an organisational psychologist at Columbia and with an undergraduate degree from NYU Stern, she has spent over fifteen years inside Fortune 500 organisations. The question her work returns to is why capable people stay quiet in the moments that matter. Her client list, which includes Google, Bloomberg, Sony Music, RBC, Ernst & Young, and Jefferies, gives her a view across financial services, consulting, and tech. Her current diagnosis is what she calls the Self-Trust Recession. Leaders are surrounded by AI tools and competing opinion, and the quiet effect is that capable people are outsourcing their own judgement. The Self-Trust Reset framework she has built around this idea is a way to recognise when fear is shaping a decision and rebuild internal authority before acting on it. The earlier strand of her work runs through Be Your Own Cheerleader (Post Hill Press, January 2023). She wrote the book out of her own experience growing up between two cultures: Indian at home, American at work. It examines why people raised in collective ‘we’ cultures struggle to advocate for themselves in workplaces built around the individualistic ‘I’. That cultural lens still shapes her work and is part of what makes her credible to global teams and AAPI audiences who have lived the same code-switch. Key speaking topics Self-trust and decision-making in high-pressure environments Self-advocacy in the workplace Cross-cultural communication in global teams The cost of consensus and over-collaboration AAPI and underrepresented voices in corporate life Burnout and sustainable leadership Ideal for Leadership teams in Fortune 500 environments where decision speed and contribution quality are the bottleneck CHROs, Chief Learning Officers, and L&D leaders building cultures of voice and accountability DEI, AAPI, and Employee Resource Group programmes looking for content that goes beyond representation language High-potential talent and mid-career professionals working across cultures in global organisations Audience outcomes A clear way to recognise when fear, perfectionism, or comparison is shaping a decision instead of judgement Behavioural tools to speak up in high-stakes moments without overshooting or shutting down A vocabulary for the cultural gap between collective and individualistic workplace norms, useful for global team conversations A diagnostic for where consensus and over-discussion are slowing the team’s decisions

Why organisations work with Lilah Jones She has run the room she is now coaching. Two decades inside Microsoft, Oracle, and Google Cloud, including a stint as head of corporate sales for North Central U.S., means her advice carries the weight of someone who carried a number. Her Activation Methodology gives leaders a structured way to break decision deadlock, not a pep talk. Audiences leave with a sequenced plan for the next ninety days, owned by named people. She speaks to the operator’s problem during transitions: how to keep a team executing while the strategy, structure, or leadership above them is still being rewritten. She built and led inside a sales organisation that grew Google Cloud from a standing start into one of the largest enterprise franchises in tech, and she draws her examples from that environment rather than from secondary research. Biography highlights Roughly nine years at Google, including a role on Google Cloud’s founding sales team and head of corporate sales for North Central U.S. Earlier enterprise sales and sales-management roles at Microsoft and Oracle. Adjunct faculty at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School, teaching working professionals. Creator of the Activation Methodology, the framework behind The Activated Leader keynote and her eight-week Activated Leader group coaching programme. Has spoken for and worked with organisations including Microsoft, Google, HP, WISE, DePaul University, NIST, Lesbians Who Tech, and Women of Influence. Biography Most leadership programmes assume the bottleneck is skill. Inside large enterprises during a restructure or strategy reset, the bottleneck is usually decisions. Capable managers stop committing because the next layer up is still moving, and entire quarters disappear into preparation that never ships. Lilah Jones spent roughly two decades inside that environment. She joined Google Cloud’s founding sales team and later ran corporate sales for the North Central U.S., after earlier sales and management roles at Microsoft and Oracle. The through-line of that career is selling and managing while the surrounding business is being rebuilt, which is the same condition most of her clients now face. The work she does today turns that operator experience into a method. Her Activation Methodology, taught through The Activated Leader keynote and an eight-week group coaching programme, is built around a single move: getting leaders from analysis to commitment with a clear, sequenced plan and named owners. The named keynotes around it, including Courage as a Carry-On and Manage Your Blindspots, address the adjacent problems of feedback, self-advocacy, and the personal cost of stalled decisions. She also teaches, as adjunct faculty at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School, and has worked with organisations including Microsoft, Google, HP, WISE, DePaul University and NIST. The audience she is most useful to is the layer of senior managers and directors who are expected to drive a transition without the authority to redesign it. Key speaking topics Leading through transitions and restructures Executive decision-making under uncertainty Sales leadership and high-performing commercial teams Psychological safety and feedback culture Career transitions for senior operators Transformation execution inside large enterprises Ideal for CROs, CCOs and sales leadership running through reorganisation, integration or new go-to-market models Heads of leadership and executive development designing programmes for director and VP populations CHROs and transformation leads running enterprise-wide change where middle-layer execution is the constraint Women in leadership networks and senior-women development programmes inside large organisations Audience outcomes A named method for moving a stalled leadership team from review to commitment within a defined window. Specific language for separating the decisions that need more analysis from the ones that have been ready to make for weeks. A clearer view of how feedback culture and psychological safety either accelerate or quietly block execution. Concrete examples from inside Google Cloud, Microsoft and Oracle of how senior leaders behave when their own ground is shifting.

Why organisations work with Karenjeet Kaur Bains She holds a Guinness World Record (42 bodyweight squats in a minute, set against a male equivalent of 34) and a Commonwealth gold, which gives her claims about pressure and preparation a weight that motivational speakers without competitive credentials cannot match. She is the first British Sikh woman to represent Great Britain at the European and World powerlifting championships, which makes her a credible voice on what representation actually costs and produces inside an institution. She qualified as an ACA Chartered Accountant and spent six years in audit at KPMG, so she speaks to professional services and corporate audiences in their own language rather than from outside it. She combines a primetime BBC platform as Athena on Gladiators with a serious athletic and professional record, which lands with employee networks, ERGs, and graduate populations in a way a single-track speaker rarely does. Biography highlights Commonwealth Powerlifting Champion; first British Sikh woman to represent Great Britain at European and World championships. Guinness World Record holder, most bodyweight squats by a woman in one minute (42 reps, 2022). ACA Chartered Accountant; six years at KPMG in audit before moving into charity finance. Athena on the BBC One reboot of Gladiators, broadcast on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. British Powerlifting Athlete of the Year, 2023 and 2024. Listed keynote speaker at the ICAEW Annual Conference. Biography Powerlifting is one of the smallest, most demographically narrow sports in Britain. The first British Sikh woman to represent Great Britain at the European and World championships is also a Commonwealth gold medallist and a Guinness World Record holder. That combination is what Karenjeet Kaur Bains brings into a room. Her route to elite strength sport ran through, not around, a professional services career. She qualified as an ACA Chartered Accountant, spent six years at KPMG in audit, and trained for international competition in the hours either side of a working day. The Guinness record (42 bodyweight squats in a minute, against a male equivalent of 34) was set in two weeks of preparation while she held a full-time charity finance role. Her account of how high performers actually structure their lives is grounded, not theoretical. Since 2024 she has appeared as Athena on the BBC One reboot of Gladiators, which has put her in front of a household audience without softening the technical seriousness of her sport. ICAEW lists her as a keynote speaker at its Annual Conference, and she has been recognised as British Powerlifting Athlete of the Year in 2023 and 2024. For HR, DEI and employee engagement leaders, the value is specific. She speaks to what it takes for someone visibly different to stay, perform, and be seen inside institutions that did not previously include her, and what employers, networks and managers can usefully do about it. Key speaking topics Representation and identity in elite environments Performance under pressure and recovery from injury South Asian women in sport and professional life Breaking cultural and gender stereotypes Resilience and the psychology of high performance Inclusive culture in professional services Ideal for CHROs, DEI leads, and employee network sponsors planning Heritage Month, IWD, or culture moments. Professional services firms briefing graduate, qualified-accountant, and women’s network audiences. Leadership and high-performance offsites looking for a credentialled athlete voice over a generic motivational one. Audience outcomes A grounded picture of what visible representation costs and produces inside an institution. A practical sense of how high performers structure preparation, recovery, and the routine work around a peak. Language for ERGs and managers on how to support employees who are first or only in their roles. A reframing of “strength”, physical and professional, that audiences can use in their own teams.

Why organisations work with Lee Rubin He gives leadership teams a named, repeatable framework, the Five Cs (competitors, common goal, communication, chemistry, consistency), so culture work stops being a slogan and becomes a checklist a manager can run on Monday. He has lived both sides of the room: captain of a Big Ten football programme and 16+ years as an HR executive inside Fortune 500 environments including Johnson & Johnson, Sony, and JP Morgan. Audiences hear locker-room stories backed by enterprise people-strategy experience. He addresses the specific failure mode senior leaders see most often, talented individuals who do not function as a team, rather than the generic topic of “culture”. His delivery converts. Bureau and client materials consistently book him for sales kickoffs, leadership offsites, and all-hands events where the goal is alignment before execution, not abstract inspiration. Biography highlights Captain and three-year starting free safety, Penn State Nittany Lions football. 1994 Florida Citrus Bowl Defensive MVP; All-Big Ten Conference selection; Honorable Mention All-American. 16+ years as a Human Resources executive serving Fortune 500 corporations. Author of WIN: Simple Insights to Help You Win the Game of Life and a companion edition for student-athletes. Signature keynote “5 Components of Extraordinary Teams” delivered to clients including Johnson & Johnson, Sony, and JP Morgan. TEDx presenter on team performance. Bachelor’s degree in Speech Communications with a Business minor, Penn State University. Biography A football captain learns something a corporate org chart rarely teaches. Talent is not the constraint. The constraint is whether eleven people, eleven directors, eleven engineers, share a goal clearly enough that they can adjust to each other in real time. Lee Rubin spent three years as a starting free safety at Penn State, captained the team, and earned 1994 Florida Citrus Bowl Defensive MVP honours. He then spent 16 years inside Fortune 500 HR functions watching the same dynamic play out in conference rooms. Out of that two-track career came the Five Cs: competitors, common goal, communication, chemistry, consistency. It is the spine of his signature keynote, “5 Components of Extraordinary Teams,” and it gives leaders a working vocabulary for diagnosing why a capable group is not performing as a team. Each component is concrete enough to be acted on the next week, not abstract enough to be ignored. His client list runs from Johnson & Johnson, Sony, and JP Morgan to college athletic departments and professional sports organisations. The range matters. The same framework that helps an enterprise sales team align around a quarterly goal helps a coaching staff align around a season. Buyers booking Rubin are typically wrestling with a specific symptom, post-merger silos, a stalled transformation, a high-turnover quarter, and want a session that produces shared language, not a closing high. He is also the author of WIN: Simple Insights to Help You Win the Game of Life, with a parallel edition written for student-athletes. The books extend the keynote argument: that the habits of high-performing teams, accountability, clarity of role, mutual respect, are the same habits that produce high-performing individuals. Key speaking topics Team performance and the Five Cs framework Building championship culture inside corporate teams Communication and chemistry under pressure Leadership lessons from elite athletics Employee engagement and buy-in Peak performance for individuals and teams Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders running culture, engagement, or post-merger integration work Sales leaders preparing kickoffs where alignment matters more than tactics Heads of transformation rebuilding teams after restructuring College and professional sports organisations investing in leadership development Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary, the Five Cs, that managers can use the next day to diagnose team friction Specific tactics for converting individual talent into collective output Renewed clarity on the difference between a group of strong performers and a functioning team Practical communication habits that hold up when a team is under pressure

Why organisations work with Sylvia Marusyk A practising occupational therapist, not a wellness coach, which gives wellbeing content credibility with EHS, operations and unionised audiences who routinely dismiss soft programming. Thirty years of clinical work translated into language that holds a room of utility engineers, nurses, municipal workers and aerospace technicians, not only an HR audience. A repeatable session catalogue covering stress, engagement, respectful conduct and self-health, with named talks that buyers can match to a specific workforce problem. Author of Testing Positive: 365 Days of Calm Through Chaos, written through her own cancer diagnosis, which gives the wellbeing material lived authority rather than borrowed theory. Track record across Manitoba Hydro, Great-West Life, City of Winnipeg, Transport Canada, Health Canada, StandardAero and the Manitoba Nurses Union, so buyers can see the work has held up across regulated, industrial and public sector environments. Biography highlights Founder and owner of MindBody Works Inc., a Canadian workplace health and wellness consultancy. Registered occupational therapist with more than 30 years of practice in health, safety and workplace wellbeing. Author of Testing Positive: 365 Days of Calm Through Chaos, a daily guide written after her cancer diagnosis during the pandemic. Host of the Trigger with Sylvia Marusyk podcast and former host of the Happy Hour with Sylvia radio programme. Speaking and training clients include Manitoba Hydro, Great-West Life, Transport Canada, Health Canada, City of Winnipeg, StandardAero, Manitoba Nurses Union and CAPPA. Signature programmes include Surviving to Thriving, Stressed to Kill, Happy Hour Begins at 9am, Respectfully, Up Yours! and Rules of Engagement. Biography Wellbeing budgets have grown for a decade, yet absence, burnout and turnover keep rising. The problem is not awareness. It is that most workplace health content sits a long way from the physical and cognitive reality of the people actually doing the work, which is precisely the gap Sylvia Marusyk has spent her career closing. She trained as an occupational therapist and has practised in the field for more than thirty years. That clinical grounding shapes everything she does on stage: the body and the brain treated as a single working system, stress described in biochemical and behavioural terms, prevention framed as an operational discipline rather than a lifestyle choice. As founder of MindBody Works Inc., she has built a Canadian workplace health consultancy around that approach. Her session catalogue is unusually concrete for the wellbeing category. Stressed to Kill unpacks the physical, cognitive, emotional and environmental components of stress. Surviving to Thriving offers self-health tools that hold up under pressure. Respectfully, Up Yours! turns psychological safety into a behavioural conversation, and Rules of Engagement tackles retention and engagement. The book Testing Positive: 365 Days of Calm Through Chaos, written through her own cancer diagnosis, supplies the personal spine to the clinical content. The credibility shows up in who books her. Manitoba Hydro, Great-West Life, Transport Canada, Health Canada, the City of Winnipeg, StandardAero and the Manitoba Nurses Union have all put her in front of audiences that are unforgiving of generic wellness talk: engineers, nurses, municipal staff, aerospace technicians. That is the market she has built her work for. Key speaking topics Workplace stress and burnout prevention Employee wellbeing and mental health at work Occupational health and injury prevention Respectful workplace culture and psychological safety Employee engagement and retention Resilience and self-health practices Workplace happiness and work-life conflict Ideal for CHROs, heads of wellbeing and EHS leaders rebuilding stress, absence and injury programmes Operations and safety leaders in utilities, healthcare, aerospace, manufacturing and municipal services Union and member organisations commissioning content for frontline and clinical workforces HR and culture leads addressing respectful conduct, engagement and retention in fatigued teams Audience outcomes A clinical understanding of how stress affects the body, brain and behaviour at work Specific self-health practices audiences can apply during and after the working day Language for naming and addressing disrespectful conduct without escalating it A sharper sense of where wellbeing programmes are working and where they are theatre Renewed energy and humour in rooms that often arrive defensive about wellbeing content

Why organisations work with Dan Edwards He has actually led a large public-sector workforce through a sustained cultural rebuild, including pandemic-era disruption, rather than describing the work from a consultancy seat. His talks come with named, road-tested models, the 5Cs of Improvement and Repositioning Doughnuts among them, that translate cleanly out of education into any large operational workforce. He is one of the few credible male voices speaking publicly about psychological safety and male mental health in front-line teams, through his MENtal Health talk. The delivery is performer-grade. He has a stand-up and stage background that keeps a senior audience with him through difficult material on wellbeing and morale. His creative business, the Fibre studio space, is built around working creative communities, which gives him direct operating experience of inclusion and creativity as workforce outcomes rather than values statements. Biography highlights Founder of Fibre, a warehouse studio in Leicester for film, photography, live events, and creative production. Former Principal of a large inner-city primary school in Leicester; prior Executive school leadership roles. Drama teacher background in inner-city secondary schools; entered teaching as a mature trainee via night school after leaving school with two GCSEs. Speaker at the SSAT Primary Conference 2021 on leading a school community through the coronavirus pandemic; international training work includes The Sultan’s School in Oman. Writes ‘Brief Reflections On…’, a newsletter of essays on leadership, culture, and community. Stage performer and writer; “The Sound of Muzak” was nominated for the Audience Choice Award at the 2024 Leicester Comedy Festival. Biography Large workforces have absorbed five years of change, and the cultural cost is now visible in engagement scores, sickness data, and middle-management churn. Edwards spent the worst of that period running a large inner-city primary school in Leicester, holding a staff body and parent community together when the national playbook for leadership had stopped working. That job, and the executive school leadership work that followed, is the substance behind his keynote material. The 5Cs of Improvement and Repositioning Doughnuts are not theoretical frameworks; they are the models he built to keep a school improving while wellbeing was collapsing. The translation into corporate settings is direct, because the underlying tension, leading people through sustained pressure without burning them out, is the same. Edwards now runs Fibre, a warehouse studio in Leicester for film, photography, and live events, built around a working creative community. The work has also travelled, including school culture and leadership training at The Sultan’s School in Oman. Running a live creative space gives him a current operating vantage point on culture and creative discipline, which keeps the talks from drifting into nostalgia for the education world. The delivery is the differentiator at the senior end. A stand-up and theatre background, including a 2024 Leicester Comedy Festival nomination for “The Sound of Muzak”, means his keynotes on staff mental health and male psychological safety land in front of audiences that have heard the standard wellbeing pitch too many times. Key speaking topics Organisational culture and staff wellbeing Authentic and humane leadership Male mental health and psychological safety at work Creativity beyond the creative industries People development and change leadership Inclusion and belonging at work Belonging and engagement in large workforces Ideal for HR and people directors in large, change-fatigued workforces CEOs and executive leadership teams rebuilding culture after restructure or sustained disruption Leadership development programmes and middle-management conferences Public sector, education and healthcare leadership audiences Audience outcomes A working language for the difference between performative wellbeing and substantive cultural change. Two named models, the 5Cs of Improvement and Repositioning Doughnuts, applied to their own organisational context. A more honest internal conversation about male mental health and psychological safety on the front line. Specific reference points for leading a workforce through prolonged pressure without losing it.

Why organisations work with Jane Dougall Live news discipline transfers directly to the stage. She runs a corporate panel the way she runs a BBC studio segment: tight timing, controlled handovers, and a clear line of questioning that does not drift. She handles awkward moments without making them awkward. A guest who refuses the question, a panellist who dominates, a technical failure on stage; the audience sees a host in command rather than a host coping. She brings a credible second voice on women’s sport. Having co-created Sportswomen, the first dedicated women’s sport programme on British television, and hosted the Scottish Women’s Football Awards since 2018, she can hold a substantive panel on the commercial rise of the women’s game. She is comfortable across formats. Awards host, conference moderator, fireside interviewer, after-dinner speaker; the same journalistic discipline carries across. Biography highlights BBC sports news presenter, regular on BBC Breakfast, BBC World, and the Six and Ten O’Clock News. Co-creator and former presenter of Sportswomen at Sky Sports News. Previous senior reporting roles at Sky News, Channel 5 and ITV Granada. Host of the Scottish Women’s Football Awards since 2018. On-air coverage of UEFA Women’s EURO 2025, UEFA EURO 2024, FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023, alongside US political coverage and Hurricane Katrina. More than twenty years in live broadcast journalism. Biography A corporate event is a piece of live television without a producer in the gallery. Run badly, the audience drifts. Run well, the room leaves with something useful. The hosts who do this best are usually people who have spent years on live news, where the consequences of losing the thread are visible in real time. Jane has been a BBC sports news presenter for more than five years, with regular appearances on BBC Breakfast and the Six and Ten O’Clock News. Before the BBC she spent a long period at Sky Sports News, where she co-created and fronted Sportswomen, the first British television programme dedicated exclusively to women’s sport. Earlier in her career she reported for Sky News, Channel 5 and ITV Granada, covering Hurricane Katrina and US presidential politics among other assignments. Two strands matter for corporate buyers. The first is the hosting and moderation discipline that comes from twenty years of live work: pacing, listening, controlled interruption, the ability to keep a panel moving when a guest is dodging the question. The second is a credible second-string keynote on the commercial rise of women’s sport, supported by her ongoing role as host of the Scottish Women’s Football Awards since 2018 and on-air coverage of UEFA Women’s EURO 2025 and the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023. The strongest brief for Jane is a conference, awards night, or leadership event where the organisation needs a host who reads the room as carefully as a newsroom reads a developing story. Key speaking topics Event hosting and emcee Panel moderation and fireside interviews Awards ceremony hosting Women’s sport: commercial growth and media coverage Sports journalism and broadcast storytelling Representation and inclusion in sport Ideal for Marketing, brand and communications leaders running flagship customer or partner conferences. HR and DEI leads programming events around inclusion, representation or women in leadership. Sponsorship, partnerships and rights teams across sport and sport-adjacent brands. Awards organisers and industry associations needing a senior host on the night. Audience outcomes A panel that stays on the question and ends on time. A clearer view of why women’s sport is now a serious commercial category rather than a CSR line. Difficult questions asked of senior panellists without the room tightening. An event that feels professionally run rather than improvised.

Why organisations work with The Tempest Two A two-handed delivery rooted in shared, verifiable experience. Most resilience content is told solo. The duo dynamic, including dialogue and disagreement on stage, lands as conversation rather than lecture. The Atlantic row, Patagonia ultra-triathlon and El Capitan ascent are all self-funded, self-organised expeditions started without the relevant skills. The lesson on agency is structurally different from a story told by a former soldier or elite athlete. Operating discipline behind the talks. Through Dose, the same lessons are productised into workplace programmes for clients such as Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb, so a keynote can sit inside a wider engagement rather than ending at the closing slide. Tonal range commercial buyers actually want. The act works on a sales kick-off stage, an EMEA marketing conference or an internal wellbeing day without code-switching, which is rare in the adventure-speaker field. Biography highlights 3,000-mile unaided ocean row from the Canary Islands to Barbados, completed in 54 days, with no prior rowing or sailing experience. World-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia in 2017: 1,600km cycle, 65km Huemul Circuit run, 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona river. Winter ascent of Mont Blanc and El Capitan summit in Yosemite, the latter on roughly 18 months of climbing experience. Co-founders of Dose, a workplace wellbeing company working with Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb among others. Keynote clients include Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Heineken, Vodafone, Red Bull, Dropbox, Tesco, Waitrose & Partners, NatWest and Gymshark. Hosts of The Tempest Two Pod on adventure, mindset and performance. Biography Two friends in marketing jobs decided to row the Atlantic. Neither had sat in a rowing boat. Fifty-four days after leaving the Canary Islands, James Whittle and Tom Caulfield reached Barbados, having met the first hurricane to form in the Atlantic in fifty years on the way. The story matters because the starting point was ordinary, which is the point of every keynote that has followed. What came next was a deliberate run of self-organised expeditions: a winter ascent of Mont Blanc, a climb of El Capitan, a London-to-Sahara motorbike ride, and a self-styled world-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia stitching together a 1,600km cycle, the 65km Huemul Circuit and a 100km paddleboard descent of the La Leona river. None were undertaken with the relevant elite credentials beforehand. That gap, between what they could obviously do and what they did anyway, became the working material. In 2018 they built Dose, a workplace wellbeing and performance company, around the same idea. Resilience and growth mindset are taught not as motivational concepts but as practices for teams under load. Clients include Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb. The keynote and the operating business reinforce each other; an event can lead to a programme rather than a one-off morale lift. The act sits in a specific commercial niche. It is not pure adventure inspiration, and it is not corporate consulting in disguise. It is a two-person performance for the part of an organisation that has heard the resilience message before and stopped listening, told by two people who keep proving the premise on themselves. Key speaking topics Growth mindset Resilience under pressure Team performance and trust Operating outside the comfort zone Embracing risk and failure Courage-based leadership Workplace wellbeing and engagement Ideal for CHROs and heads of employee engagement designing resilience and wellbeing programmes that need a credible opening moment. Sales, marketing and commercial leadership running annual kick-offs that need energy without slipping into hype. Culture and L&D leads looking for keynote content that can be extended into team workshops rather than ending at applause. Founder-led and high-growth companies whose teams are carrying sustained pressure and need a shared language for it. Audience outcomes A working definition of growth mindset that survives contact with a hard week back in the office. Specific habits the duo use to prepare for, push through and recover from extended pressure, transferable to a team context. A reframing of failure and risk that gives more junior staff permission to act with higher agency. A shared reference point across a team that lasts beyond the event, often picked up by Dose programming where it follows.

Why organisations work with Tommy Caulfield Stories with receipts. The Atlantic crossing, the Patagonia ultra triathlon, and the El Capitan climb are documented adventures, not platform anecdotes, which gives the resilience material an evidence base most motivational keynotes do not have. The “ordinary person” frame. Caulfield was a content marketer with no endurance background before any of this. That makes the material legible to a non-elite audience in a way that ex-military and Olympic speakers often are not. A specific intellectual hook in High Agency. The signature talk reframes resilience as ownership and decisive action under ambiguity, which gives people teams a more useful organising idea than “be resilient.” A corporate client list that signals fit. Repeat work with Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Airbnb, Nike, Dropbox, BNY Mellon, and Gymshark indicates the content travels across sectors and seniority levels. Biography highlights Co-founder of The Tempest Two with James Whittle, the speaking and adventure partnership formed after their 2015 Atlantic crossing. Rowed 3,000 miles across the Atlantic unaided in 54 days, from the Canary Islands to Barbados, with no prior rowing experience. Completed a world-first ultra triathlon in Patagonia: 1,600km cycle, 65km mountain run, and a 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona river between Lakes Viedma and Argentino. Climbed El Capitan in Yosemite with 36 months’ climbing experience. Co-founder of Dose, a workplace wellbeing company whose clients have included Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM, and Airbnb. Host of The Tempest Two Pod, a podcast on adventure mindset. Corporate keynote clients include Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Dropbox, Heineken, Gymshark, and Rapid7. Biography Most resilience content fails the room within five minutes. The audience has heard the abstract version. They have done the workshop. What they have not heard is someone who can describe what changes in the head when a 7-metre rowing boat capsizes 1,500 miles from land in a hurricane, and then say something useful about Monday morning. That is the slot Tommy Caulfield fills. He and James Whittle, who together form The Tempest Two, rowed 3,000 miles unaided across the Atlantic in 2015 with no prior rowing experience. They followed it with a world-first ultra triathlon across Patagonia in 2017: a 1,600km cycle, a 65km mountain run, and a 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona river. They climbed El Capitan in 2019 with three years of climbing experience between them. The keynote work draws on those expeditions, but the proposition is structural rather than anecdotal. The signature talk, High Agency, treats ownership and decisive action under ambiguity as a learnable workplace skill, not a personality trait. It is built for audiences who are tired of being told to be resilient and want a more specific mental model. The corporate adoption supports the case. Caulfield has delivered repeat keynotes for Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Airbnb, Nike, Dropbox, BNY Mellon, Gymshark, and Heineken, and co-founded the workplace wellbeing company Dose, which has worked with Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM, and Airbnb. The “ordinary person” framing is the differentiator: no elite athletic background, no military service, no academic credential. The credibility lives in the expeditions themselves and the room responses they produce. Key speaking topics Resilience and performance under pressure High agency and ownership at work Growth mindset Team performance in adversity Adventure mindset and behaviour change Decision-making under uncertainty Ideal for People and culture leaders looking for resilience and mindset content that lands with a mid-career audience. Sales, customer, and high-pressure operating teams running annual kick-offs or away-days. HR and L&D teams designing wellbeing or performance programmes that need a credible external opener. Conference programmes wanting an adventure-led keynote with a corporate client track record rather than a pure inspirational slot. Audience outcomes A working definition of high agency that an audience can apply to their own decisions, not a generic call to be more resilient. A felt sense of what mindset under prolonged pressure actually looks like, drawn from documented expeditions rather than abstract examples. Specific habits and decision routines used to keep moving through setbacks, capsizes, and prolonged adversity. A reset of what “ordinary” people are capable of when the frame shifts from experience to ownership.